I am a mug

And upgrading Ubuntu is a mug's game.

I had a perfectly functioning server running 9.10. I upgraded to 10.04 today, and:

• Samba is broken. I thought it might be a password problem so I reset the password. I reloaded smbd, no dice. Maybe it's a permissions problem? Unmount, check, remount, no dice. The logs showed nothing. A few other dead ends before I spent ten minutes googling and discovered that the defaults are now no good for me. I had a symlink in a share, and it won't follow symlinks by default. To fix it, I added this to smb.conf and restarted smbd:

   follow symlinks = yes 

   wide links = yes

   unix extensions = no

• My 2nd hard drive stopped being recognised. Ten more minutes of googling to learn that I needed to go into BIOS and turn off floppy support. I don't have a floppy drive in the machine, so I don't know why it was on in the first place, but it used to just work in 9.10.

Instead of watching TV (off the networked file share) I have spent half an hour stuffing around with settings. A relaxing evening was spoiled by Canonical breaking backwards compatibility. I think this shall be my last Ubuntu upgrade for this server. (It will probably keep running Ubuntu, but I won't upgrade it again.)

I have since discovered that Ubuntu also has some compiler warnings enabled by default in their distribution of gcc. This is the stuff that Microsoft got bagged for when they started telling people strcpy was deprecated, and it's not OK. Prefix your builds ubuntu- or something, don't mess with vanilla gcc. Messing with defaults without making it extremely obvious leads to surprises, and surprises are bad.